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RICE UNIVERSITY Food for Sympathy: Illness, Nursing, and Affect In RICE UNIVERSITY Food for Sympathy: Illness, Nursing, and Affect in Victorian Literature and Culture by Ba~ak Demirhan A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE: Helena Michie, Professor of English, Agnes Cullen Arnold Chair in Humanities ~ Robert L. Patten, Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities in History HOUSTON, TEXAS MAY 2010 ABSTRACT Food for Sympathy: Illness, Nursing, and Affect in Victorian Literature and Culture by Basak Demirhan The profuse illness and nursing narratives in Victorian texts frequently feature sympathy for physical suffering as a major cultural and literary trope. In a wide variety of texts ranging from social reform writing to autobiographies, from novels to poetry, physical suffering was often closely associated with a specific cultural form of affect called sympathy. While earlier epistemologies of sympathy developed by Scottish Enlightenment writers defined it as a free agent that autonomously flowed through individuals, toward the mid-century, this model left its place to formulations of sympathy as an alignment of affect between clearly separated subjects that could be achieved through sympathetic imagination. This epistemological and cultural shift is strongly apparent in both fictional and nonfinctional depictions of sympathy for the sick. Critical works on the nineteenth-century culture of illness and medical care have tended to focus on the community-building functions of the sickroom. However, the illness-nursing dyad constitutes an affective structure through which some less examined aspects of sympathy for physical suffering, such as the alterity and abjection of bodies in pain, can be explored. Descriptions of physical suffering usually followed certain narrative conventions that positioned the sufferers and their nurses as objects or subjects of sympathy. This particular object-subject relationship facilitated the construction, negotiation, and redefinition of collective identities like nationality, gender, and class. While nursing memoirs and conduct manuals adhered to conventional ideals of femininity, they also expanded definitions of feminity and maternalism to include competence. In their war nursing memoirs, unprivileged or marginalized women who worked as nurses were able to inscribe themselves as professional women and national subjects by contributing to the national narratives of the war with soothing narratives of their nursing experience. In Bildungsromans, their sympathy for disabled male companions enabled socially and economically disenfranchised male protagonists to reconstruct wounded masculinity as a hegemonic masculinity model. Destabilized social identities, on the other hand, culminated in novelistic examples of resistance to sympathy on the level of character or narrative, which the authors used as a representational strategy to approach dilemmas for which there are no solutions. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people who made this dissertation possible and because of whom my graduate experience has been one which I will cherish forever. lowe my deepest gratitude to my advisor Helena Michie for her unfailing ability to engage directly with the core issues in my writing, for having faith in my project, for her practical approach to writing and research, her sense of humor, her patience, and her genuine kindness. I am truly blessed to have her in my life. I am grateful to Robert L. Patten and Martin Wiener for being such insightful and helpful readers. Professor Wiener is the historian that any historicist literary scholar would want to have as a reader. Professor Patten deserves special thanks for his dedication, enriching comments, and personal encouragement which helped me greatly during each stage of my project. This thesis would not have been possible without the academic excellence and generous support of Rice University English Department. The first two chapters of my dissertation took shape as a result of my archival research at the Well come Library of History of Medicine which was made possible by the Margaret Ostrum Research Grant. I would also like to acknowledge the Victorian Studies Seminars, the Dickens Project, and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexualities for contributing significantly to my intellectual and academic development. My parents Cigdem Demirhan and Izzet Demirhan have been a source of encouragement, guidance, and inspiration all my life. I warmly appreciate their support and understanding. It is a pleasure to thank my graduate student cohort for making graduate school a very special period of my life with their love and wit. I am especially thankful to Elizabeth Womack, Victoria Ford Smith, Joy Pasini, Jeffrey Jackson, and Michael Meeuwis for generously sparing their time to copy-edit my chapters; to Ayse Celikkol, Amelia Scholtz, Sophie Weeks, Molly Slattery, Vica Papp, Ipek Martinez, and Linda Evans for always being ready with a listening ear, stimulating conversation, good advice, and delicious food. CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Suffering and Sympathy in the Crimean War Nursing Memoirs .......... 32 Chapter 2 The Politics of Sympathy: Mary Seacole and the Other "Other" Nurses 106 Chapter 3 Wounded Masculinity and the Power of Sympathy in Nicholas Nickleby and John Halifax, Gentleman .............................................................. 145 Chapter 4 Hidden Sickrooms and Resistance to Sympathy ........................... 212 Bibliography ................................................................................. 250 Introduction In Life in the Sickroom (1844), Harriet Martineau wrote that: "[i]f sorrow teaches us that nothing is more universal than sympathy, long and irremediable sickness proves plainly, that nothing is more various than its kinds and degrees; or it may be, than the manifestations of the sympathetic grief which is shared by all".l Martineau makes an important claim that sympathy for someone in physical suffering-whether pain, illness or disability-manifests complex interpersonal interactions. Sympathetic identification with someone in pain can prompt one to cringe at the sight of bodily damage, or it could evoke humanitarian feelings for the sufferer. It can signify middle-class sensibility, point to the permeability of the boundaries between self and the other, be imagined as a channel for contagion of disease and feeling, or function in consolidating social hierarchies between the sufferers and their caretakers. The nature of sympathy can be debated, but there is no doubt that manifestations of sympathetic emotions are shaped by medical training, expectations of the sufferers or their families, and larger social forces. So are the sufferers' responses to sympathy. The abundant scenes of sickness and sympathy in nineteenth-century fiction attest that illness and sympathy presented a lens through which social forms and individual identities could be negotiated. Illness scenes are often pivotal points in novels. A nursing plot can overthrow or reconsolidate the existing power dynamics within a family. An episode of illness can initiate an adoption plot or finalize a marriage plot in a novel. The physical proximity involved in nursing enables 1 characters to express their suppressed sexual desires or create a language for homoerotic desire. In this project, I will analyze fictional and nonfictional narratives of physical suffering and sympathy which acknowledge these components. I examine canonical and non-canonical texts written between 1830 and 1880, including nursing manuals, memoirs, and novels. I develop a new language to talk about sympathy that accounts for alterity, abjection, apathy, and resistance to sympathy as inherent components of these affective structures. Rather than instinctive and spontaneous compassion for a sufferer, sympathy meant, for Victorians, a conscious process of achieving emotional alignment by overcoming negative components of affective relationships such as alterity, apathy, and abjection. This distinction has significant implications in terms of the power of affect in forming subjectivities. These relational structures, which I will call structures of sympathy, position individuals as objects and subjects of sympathy. My individual chapters show how objects or subjects of sympathy construct their masculinity, national identity, class identity. One of the overarching goals of this project is to locate our contemporary understanding of sympathy in the Victorian period. Victorian sympathy can be placed in a historical trajectory of emotions ranging from Early Modern passion to eighteenth-century sensibility. Like "passion" and "sensibility," it is a cultural framework for describing affect, and it is reflective of its period's understanding of subjectivity, alterity, and intersubjective relations. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings on affect manifest a change in the definition of sympathy. These writings show that David Hume's notion of moral sentiment as a free agent that flows from one 2 individual to another left its place to Adam Smith's formulation of sympathy as an alignment of affect that is achieved between clearly separated subjects, through the sympathetic imagination. Illness, pain, and disability create a specific alienation between the sufferers and their observers, as well as self-alienation in the sufferers. While writings on sympathy for the sick elaborate
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